The Truth About Getting Hurt

Getting hurt in life is inevitable. The truth is: people will hurt you; the people closest to you and the ones you care about most will take a stab at your heart. It’s impossible to escape; in fact, it’s an essential act in life. As an unavoidable reality, we need to learn how to deal with it, rather than trying to avoid it at all costs.

As the late and great Bob Marley once said, "The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.” One of the most blissful and purest feelings that we experience is love. This is because it is a real feeling that we attain from interacting with someone that we find interesting and attractive.

It’s not a feeling we can buy, sell or pretend to have. It’s real and it’s pure because it is something that only we can feel when we have such a connection with another person. The idea is essentially codependent. The feeling of love is contingent on someone else, which has you at his or her whim. Love is reflexive – and relies entirely on how they decide to treat you when you do love them and vice versa.

However we often mistakenly conflate the codependence of love with our happiness. Whereas love is the product of you and someone else, your happiness should reside in you firstly and independently. A huge mistake we make in relationships is doing everything in our power to mold our happiness towards what the other party would see it best fit, which only takes everything downhill from there.

We are all going to get hurt -- and get hurt badly. Yes, we are going to have our hearts crushed and feel like they have sunk into our stomachs, but this is only a growing process. Think about it, it is nearly impossible not to get hurt, it’s not like any of us are going to stay with our high school sweethearts our whole lives. We are all going to have that one person that has walked out of our lives and has left us emotionally distraught. It is the one thing that we all share in common because of its emotional severity.

Getting hurt is not fun. Through the course of it, we lose ourselves and have to re-find who we separate from that other person. But we might look at this in a positive light. It takes us from dependence to independence. People are afraid to get hurt because they don't know how to cope with it, they feel like they have lost something, but instead they are given an opportunity to gain everything -- and that everything is finding themselves.

Sometimes losing someone sends us into a tailspin. We don’t gain what we should from the break, and we lose ourselves even further. And we begin to use that person that broke our hearts as a scapegoat for everything going wrong in life.

Many people will lose their minds, try to drink, smoke and party the pain away. Others will go through retail therapy -- and then there are those geniuses that think jumping to a rebound is the smartest move -- just to fill the void. People deal with being hurt the wrong way, which is what destroys them from ever really finding the feeling of love again.

People become afraid to love again, they don't want to feel vulnerable and they don't want to let anyone to0 close because they are afraid of feeling the same way they have felt before. The real issue is that people think that short-term highs will help them heal faster, but in reality they are just pushing it back in order to deal with it later, and are not being honest with themselves.

When we are hurt, we have to deal with it right away and not push or delay it because we are afraid of the depressing feeling it might bring. Dealing with hurt is what shapes you as a person. When you hurt, you have emotions of anger and sadness, it is essential to embrace these, deal with them and channel them into something positive for your life: like your job or a new hobby you picked up.

Dealing with the emotions might seem hard at first, but will ultimately lead to a much quicker and healthier recovery in the long-run, rather than trying to run away from those feelings by drinking yourself to death.

It is also your opportunity to become more independent and understand yourself. People confuse the gravity of being hurt as a sign that they’ll never being able to love again. But as you slowly contemplate and grow from your grief, the pain will become less and you’ll realize love might be possible again. If you deal with the hurt, you will love again and allow yourself to be in a better relationship than you were in before.

So many people think it's not possible to love again when in fact they will be if they allow themselves too. It’s about letting go and understanding that that person is out of your life for a reason and that there will be someone else that you will meet that will bring you that again. A broken heart only stays broken, if you let it. You are going to get hurt, but dealing with it will put yourself in a better position with your next partner -- and that one will most likely last a lot longer and be a lot stronger than your previous one.

We need to understand that being hurt is an inevitable aspect of life. The more we run away from it, the worse it gets. Humanity cannot survive without love, and if we feel like we have been permanently damaged, that’s why we don't allow anyone else to come into our lives. But when we go through being hurt and we deal with it with courage rather than anxiety -- that is when we become a better person throughout the course of it.

Like Bob Marley said, it’s about finding the person that you love enough to deal with it. The problem is most people are still in love with someone that already loves someone else.